On Thu, 2014-05-08 at 15:42 -0400, Glenn Sieb wrote:
If I felt what my users were asking for was unreasonable, I wouldn't have bothered to bring it here. They'd *like* to see who's posting so if they *choose* to reply privately they can. In the past, this was easy enough. The From: line was there with the OP's email address. Now, as far as I can tell, depending on the MUA the *poster* uses, there *might* be two Reply-Tos--one with the OP email, one with the list address. But that's not reliable, as it doesn't happen for ALL posters.
Hell, even a munged From: like:
"ges+lists at wingfoot dot org via Mailman-Users <mailman-users@python.org>"
would be a vast improvement over:
"ges+lists--- via Mailman-Users <mailman-users@python.org>"
I'm not as knowledgeable as Stephen or Mark, but I've been working with Internet email since the early 90s or so and have read the founding RFCs. One of the principles underlying the design of the Internet email system is that information should never be intentionally abandoned. Nothing gets dumped into the cosmic bit bucket, neither header information nor content, and NDRs and DSNs keep the sender appraised of problems with delivery. This has been a strong argument against munging of Reply-To headers going back quite a few years. Information may be _added_ by a component in the delivery chain (and generally is) but not deleted.
Arguably, the correct response to DMARC filtering _should_ be the MIME encapsulation of list mail, with appropriate RFC 2369 headers added to the enclosing MIME structure leaving the content un-munged, with all information from the original poster intact. Arguably, MUAs should be transparent to this. Arguably, this would have been the best design for the operation of mailing lists in email-space from the git-go.
We're stuck in the Real World, however, where Apple and probably other MUA authors and designers have cut corners in design and we're forced into a corner where information loss of some sort is imposed on us. From: header munging is decidedly ugly! It's perhaps the least ugly solution that still works reliably to deliver content to _everyone_ even though the information loss limits choice on the receiving end.
Your suggested partial solution ("ges+lists at wingfoot dot org via Mailman-Users ...") is also ugly, but given the situation we're in at this point, IMHO it has merit and should be worth some consideration in the design of Mailman. What goes into an address comment is, or should be, purely informational on a human level, and ignored on a computational level. Whether or not it would would confuse people is another matter. It ain't the kinder, gentler Internet I jumped into back in 1994!
-- Lindsay Haisley | "Everything works if you let it" FMP Computer Services | 512-259-1190 | - The Roadie http://www.fmp.com |